The WS-Addressing core specification describes the abstract properties to encode addressing information independently from the underlying transport protocol; the SOAP binding maps these to the SOAP 1.1 and 1.2 protocols. The WS-Addressing binding to WSDL is still at last call working draft status.

WS-Addressing, originally developed by Microsoft, IBM and BEA, had been submitted to W3C in August 2004 after a competing specification by Sun, Oracle, IONA and others, the now irrelevant WS-MessageDelivery, had been submitted in April. WS-Addressing is referenced by many other specifications such as WS-ReliableMessaging (currently being standardized at OASIS) and WS-Eventing (recently submitted to W3C).